Head in the cloud

No apologies to New Line Cinema or people with actual photoshop skills

A little while ago I admitted I was worried that after purchasing a Nexus 4 I would become a walking, talking advertisement for Google. A week later and I used some dodgy Titanic analogies to confirm that I was indeed in love with my new phone. Fast forward 9 months and my Nexus hasn’t let me down once—unlike my Blackberry, which constantly disappointed me, but, as with any problem child, I still loved it and just bitched about it behind its back.

Speaking of being let down by technology, my alleged laptop decided recently that it had had enough of being carted around in my K-Mart backpack, and decided to passive-aggressively fry its own battery rather than admit truthfully that it didn’t want to go on another jaunt with me to the library (P.S: my therapist thinks the reason I anthropomorphise my devices is that I feel it’s a lot healthier to have 8hr+/day relationships with things I consider ‘friends’ rather than pieces of humming silicon. Also my phone is rly cute).

Anyway, my laptop still works, but only if it’s plugged in. For a while I ignored its childish protests and carried it around along with its trusty power cord. Portability is important for me at the moment, because I’m “writing” a Master’s “thesis” and am “studying” a lot at the university library. Things were peachy if I could find an outlet, but more often than not this involved spending hours finding available powerpoints and then draping the cord precariously across tables, walkways, time/space continuums etc.

Also, for some reason, the designers at HP decided it would be a nice idea to build a brick right into the power cord itself. I wonder if this is actually an anti-theft device: not to use as a weapon against thieves, but rather because the would-be burglar is just too tired to carry the cinder block power cord further than three steps.

What this is all leading to (eventually) is that I finally got sick of my laptop’s resistance and started thinking about alternatives. Because I like tactile (and positive) feedback when I type I ruled out buying a tablet, although I did briefly consider one of those tablets that look like a laptop but can then detach from the keyboard. I ultimately decided against this because most of them were really small and I have kipfler potatoes for fingers. Also I learned my lesson from a flimsy phone I had circa 2010, which had a screen that flipped up and exposed the keyboard (my god, remember flip phones?).

Flipping, spinning and detachable doohickeys are fine in theory and look good when the salesperson is demonstrating them to you, but the reality is you want something INDESTRUCTIBLE and when intentional partial destructibility is built into the design then you just know something will go wrong sooner rather than later. The only time I will allow any of my devices to be taken apart at will is when we finally perfect Lego/phone technology, which granted this guy has given a pretty good go but clearly portability was way down on his design brief (also, vale Blackberry).

Image courtesy http://gadgetsin.com/

Enter the Toshiba CB30 Chromebook. According to the Toshiba website, it

STARTS FAST AND STAYS FAST

TO KEEP YOU ON CLOUD NINE

Who can resist such corporate poetry? I’ve been informed that the words ‘starts’, ‘fast’ and ‘cloud nine’ are all joint owned by Toshiba-Google, and so I have reprinted them here with their benevolent permission (but how could they refuse? I’m pretty much writing a 600 word ad for them).

Look, I’ll be honest. I don’t write tech-heavy reviews of products, or even really evaluate them properly w/r/t other options. I’m more of a gut-feel kinda writer (i.e. lazy) and the DPP seal of approval for the Chromebook is an emphatic WINNER. Here’s why:

- It has a battery life that lasts more than a tenth of a second. This isn’t me being hyperbolic; if my old laptop becomes unplugged it means instant death. So in this case, a battery life of 8 hours seems like an eternity.

- It’s light. You might not have gotten the subtle hints when I was talking about portability and brick power cords before, but my old laptop is a pain to carry around. The only bad news about getting the Chromebook is that I now seriously have to consider buying a gym membership, because lugging the HP around was the only thing keeping me in shape.

- It’s cheap. Maybe too cheap. To be honest the build quality is middling at best. I admit the whole thing feels a bit like one of those fake laptops you give to a seven year old that has lollies inside (Toshiba-Google: possibilities of lollies being included with next Chromebook? You know those stickers that are like ‘Intel Inside’? Imagine if it said ‘Fantail Inside’). But, surprisingly, the keyboard itself feels nice, and this is where 90% of computer-human interaction takes place.

-It’s not a Mac. I will never, ever get over my irrational aversion to Apple products (except iTunes. ILY).

The elephant in the cloud (SWIDT) at this point is that the computer is pretty much totally dependent on internet connectivity. I admit being so reliant on Google servers not fucking up is a little concerning, but really, I already depended on them anyway. I would advise against cloud computing unless you’re like me and have an unhealthy obsession with backing stuff up and have predictable file naming systems. Right now I back up everything I’ve written for the day on a USB, and when I get home to my housebound HP I download everything out of the cloud onto my hard drive. 

The whole internet connectivity thing isn’t really a big deal anyway, because I figure if I’m in a place without WiFi then I’m not there to study anyway. Plus if worst comes to worst, the computer can save documents temporarily offline and then update once an internet connection is established again. Feel free to quote this ‘feature’ to me when I lose three days of work due to a connection error.

So there you have it, an unbiased, unpaid, well-thought-out endorsement for the Chromebook. I figure that if I keep doing this often enough Google will one day send me a real thing to review. Of course, knowing me, that will be the day after I pledge everlasting and unconditional allegiance to Apple.